Realme GT 3 Hands-on: 240W Charging Will Blow Your Mind! | News 4 Social
Realme has launched its Realme GT 3, a high-end smartphone with 240W fast charging, a 144Hz display, and the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 SoC. I was able to test the Realme GT 3 and I give you my first impressions.
My opinion on the Realme GT 3 in brief
The Realme GT 3 was announced for Europe on February 28, 2023, at MWC 2023. It is the global and rebranded version of the Realme GT Neo 5 released in China. The smartphone does not yet have an official release date or a price for the European market. The manufacturer has simply indicated that the smartphone will be sold for approximately 610 euros excluding tax. And there are no plans on selling the phone in America.
The Realme GT 3 is the brand’s latest flagship. Its key selling point is its fast charging of 240 W. According to the manufacturer, it would recharge the 4600 mAh battery from 0 to 100% in 9 minutes and 30 seconds.
But the rest of its spec sheet is also quite complete with a 144 Hz AMOLED display and Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 SoC. Only its camera module leaves me a bit puzzled with the absence of a telephoto lens and the return of the microscopic camera we saw on the Oppo Find X3 Pro.
Design
The Realme GT 3 returns to a much more conventional design than its predecessor, the
Realme GT 2 Pro News 4 Social reviewed 8 months ago. Gone are the paper effect backs and origami patterns, we find good old glass on the front and back. But the look remains very classy.
Pros
- The matte coating on the back is very nice as well as the black and white colors.
- The LED on the back is not too obvious.
Cons
- No IP rating.
- Plastic frame.
The Realme comes in two colors: Pulse White and Booster Black. The coating is matte with a grainy effect that I find very beautiful and very pleasant to the touch. But it is also very slippery.
The smartphone measures 6.45 x 2.98 x 0.35 in (163.9 x 75.8 x 8.9 mm) and weighs 7 oz (199 g). That’s not compact, but I didn’t find it particularly bulky either.
On the back, we find the triple camera module arranged on a glass island that occupies the entire width of the smartphone. The ultra-wide angle and microscope lenses are grouped together while the main lens is all alone. This gives the impression of having only two lenses and I find this look more harmonious.
To the right of the camera module, there is an LED called Pulse Interface or “Pulse light”. Basically, it is a notification LED that is also used in a contextual way when your battery is low, when you receive a call, etc. I’ll talk about this below in the Interface/OS section.
Screen
The Realme GT 3 has a 6.74-inch AMOLED display with a 1240 x 2772 pixels resolution. It has a refresh rate of 144 Hz and a maximum brightness of 1400 nits. It’s a screen made for gaming and Realme offers plenty of settings to boost the image quality.
The strong points of the Realme GT 3:
- Nice fluidity with 144 Hz (adaptive).
- Maximum brightness of 1400 nits (peak).
- No curved edges (for those who don’t like them).
The weak points of the Realme GT 3:
- Not an LTPO panel (for a more adaptive refresh rate).
To be more precise about brightness, the Realme GT 3 only reaches 1400 nits in peak, on a restricted area of the screen. Typically, the Realme GT 3 screen reaches 500 nits and in HBM, with the brightness at full, it can go to 1100 nits. This is more than enough to ensure very good readability everywhere, indoors and outdoors.
Realme also offers quite complete settings to adjust the colorimetry of the screen. The settings are also full of modes to boost the colors, the sharpness, or the fluidity of the image on the screen. The 144Hz refresh rate is a nice addition for some games that run above 60 FPS.
Interface/OS
The Realme GT 3 runs on Realme UI 4.0, based on Android 13. I don’t have any information about the update policy since it is not officially sold here. Realme usually offers three Android updates and four years of security updates on its flagships.
Visually, Realme UI 4.0 is very close to ColorOS 13, Oppo’s overlay. Obvious, you may say. But I think it’s a good thing. The interface is spacious, the different elements are well-prioritized and the navigation is rather intuitive. We find the same Shelf menu (swiping from top to bottom on the home screen) as in Oppo and OnePlus.
Realme has also implemented Android’s dynamic themes rather well in its customization settings. You can apply the dominant color of the wallpaper to the rest of the interface. The themed icons are not there yet, however.
Finally, there is a dedicated menu called Breathing Light to customize the “Pulse interface”, the LED on the back of the smartphone. You can only choose between two types of animations (ripple and pulse). It’s a pity, I would have liked to have more. You can also choose the color to be displayed by the LED and in what context to activate it or not (call, low battery, etc.).
Performance
The Realme GT3 features Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 SoC with its Adreno 730 GPU. This octa-core chip etched in 4nm and clocked at up to 3.19GHz is coupled with 8, 12, or 16GB of RAM and 128, 256, 512 GB, or 1 TB of UFS 3.1 storage.
Last year, the Realme GT 2 also shipped with a SoC from the previous year. And this year, I think the Snapdragon 8+ Gen 1 will remain quite competitive.
Early benchmark scores with the Realme GT 3 are consistent. But I was still able to notice a bit of aggressive thermal throttling, causing noticeable framerate losses. Well, that’s on the benchmark anyway. I didn’t use the smartphone long enough to notice this behavior in-game.
Photo quality
The Realme GT 3 has a triple camera module on the back. There is a main lens with 50 MP, an ultra-wide angle lens of 8 MP, and a macro sensor called “microscope” with 2 MP. The selfie camera has a resolution of 16 MP.
The main camera has not changed from last year’s model. We are still on a 1/1.56-inch sensor with OIS, PDAF, and an f/1.9 aperture (against f/1.8 before, but the difference should be imperceptible).
The 8 MP ultra-wide angle lens has a bit too low resolution for my taste and its 112° field of view (FOV) is also rather narrow.
As for the macro or “microscope” sensor, it is simply superfluous in my eyes. But I know that some of you are attached to it. And it’s still fun sometimes to play with the microscope mode.
But overall, I find the photo module of the Realme GT 3 a bit lackluster. This is the element on which the manufacturer has made the most concessions, in my opinion.
On the video side, the Realme GT 3 can shoot up to 4K at 60 FPS with the rear photo module and up to 1080p at 30 FPS only with the selfie camera.
Autonomy and fast charging
The Realme GT 3 integrates a battery with a capacity of 4600 mAh. This battery can recharge from 0 to 100% in 9 minutes and 30 seconds according to the manufacturer. A
tour de force allowed by the technology of recharging of 240 W.
The 4600 mAh capacity isn’t crazy on paper. I quickly ran a PCMark benchmark last night, with the screen set to 200 nits and in airplane mode. The Realme GT 3 lasted 13h34 before dropping below 20% battery life, so battery life is very solid and in the upper middle of our tests.
But we don’t care about all that! It’s the fast charging that interests us here. The Realme GT 3 can charge at 240W. This is not a Realme proprietary technology, but Oppo’s. The SuperVOOC label is even printed on the charger.
But this is the fastest charging on the market. So yes, Xiaomi has announced a 300W charger, but no compatible product has been launched yet so it doesn’t count.
And being able to charge your smartphone in under 10 minutes is totally a killer feature for me. It doesn’t matter what the ragers will say in the comments.
I very quickly tried to charge my review sample from 11% battery. And it took 11 minutes to go to 100%. So we’re not under 10 minutes.
Maybe I’m trying to make excuses for Realme. But I wonder if I had “slowed down” the charging by tapping the screen a few times to check the battery level displayed on the screen. I’ll tell you more in my full test.
After charging, the power supply and the smartphone were hot. But they were definitely not too hot to the touch. I really wonder what concrete impact this kind of charging can have on the battery in the long run.
Conclusion: My first opinion
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Conclusion
The Realme GT 3 is an interesting smartphone. If its European price remains close to the global price of 649 euros announced by Realme, it will be even more so once launched.
The fast charging, often criticized and mocked as a gimmick, is a real tour de force for me. And it is a point on which manufacturers have an undeniable lead over the market leaders such as Samsung and Apple.
But I’m probably too biased. I’m clearly the core target of the Realme GT 3. The smartphone is designed for intensive multimedia use. For people who drain their battery quickly with games or video streaming. And above all, for people who don’t go to bed at 8:30 pm and charge their smartphone after brushing their teeth.
In any case, Realme doesn’t seem to be in a hurry to market the GT 3 in Europe (don’t even get me started on the US…). Everything will certainly depend on the success of the Realme GT Neo 5 on the Chinese market.
Realme GT 3
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